Aristotle METEOROLOGY Complete

Translated by E. Webster.

Aristotle Bilingual Anthology  Studies  Aristotle in Print

100 pages - You are on Page 84

Part 5

A body determined by its own boundary must be either hard or soft; for it either yields or does not.

It must also be concrete: or it could not be so determined. So since everything that is determined and solid is either hard or soft and these qualities are due to concretion, all composite and determined bodies must involve concretion. Concretion therefore must be discussed.

Now there are two causes besides matter, the agent and the quality brought about, the agent being the efficient cause, the quality the formal cause. Hence concretion and disaggregation, drying and moistening, must have these two causes.

But since concretion is a form of drying let us speak of the latter first.

As we have explained, the agent operates by means of two qualities and the patient is acted on in virtue of two qualities: action takes place by means of heat or cold, and the quality is produced either by the presence or by the absence of heat or cold; but that which is acted upon is moist or dry or a compound of both. Water is the element characterized by the moist, earth that characterized by the dry, for these among the elements that admit the qualities moist and dry are passive. Therefore cold, too, being found in water and earth (both of which we recognize to be cold), must be reckoned rather as a passive quality. It is active only as contributing to destruction or incidentally in the manner described before; for cold is sometimes actually said to burn and to warm, but not in the same way as heat does, but by collecting and concentrating heat.

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